Quitting Facebook—what's behind the new trend to leave social networks?

Sep 16, 2013

If you are ready to commit "virtual identity suicide," delete your Facebook account, and say good-bye to social networking sites, you are not alone. A social networking counter movement is emerging, and Facebook quitters, who remove their accounts, differ from Facebook users in several key ways, as described in an article in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking.

Stefan Stieger, PhD and coauthors, University of Vienna, Austria, compared more than 300 Facebook quitters to about an equal number of Facebook users. They recorded their responses to assessment measures focused on their level of concern over privacy, their tendency toward Internet addiction, and personality traits such as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.

"Given high profile stories such as WikiLeaks and the recent NSA surveillance reports, individual citizens are becoming increasingly more wary of cyber-related privacy concerns," says Brenda K. Wiederhold, PhD, MBA, BCIA, Editor-in-Chief of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, from the Interactive Media Institute, San Diego, CA. "With photo tags, profiling, and internet dependency issues, research such as Professor Stieger's is very timely."

Related Stories

With the widespread popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, it is increasingly common for people to use interpersonal electronic surveillance to monitor the activities of current and former ...

More than 900 million people worldwide are active users of the social networking site Facebook, and it is estimated that as many as one-third report using Facebook to check on the activities of former romantic ...

More than 800 million people worldwide use the social networking site Facebook, and 93% of college students have an active Facebook account, according to a recent estimate. As both students and faculty on ...

YouTube has more than 10 million unique users a month who are younger than 18 years of age, making it an ideal online environment in which to study the impact of various media content and peer feedback on adolescents. A series ...

Among adults who use social media such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and blogs for political purposes, 42% are under the age of 30. A case study of the controversial Budget Repair Bill in Wisconsin explored ...

Sexting, the use of technology to send or receive sexually explicit messages, photos, or videos, is a relatively new trend and, in many cases, has legal implications. As many as 25-50% of young people may ...

In a context of collective mass violence, such as a war, women can be just as cruel as men, commit crimes against humanity, and act with the same motives. Still many more men are involved in mass violence than women, but ...

When high school physics teacher Moses Rifkin wrote a recent blog post on "Teaching Social Justice in the Physics Classroom," he ignited a new round of conversation about white privilege and the kinds of skills ...

Today's Australians are, by far, the best educated cohort in our history –- on paper, anyway -– but this is not reflected in the quality of our political discourse. We appear to be lacking in courage, ...

I disabled my account before all of the NSA snooping became publicized. I did it when they "hijacked" my email, changing my displayed email address to something like facebookemail.com. I could have easily changed it back, but for me, that was just one "upgrade" too far.

My local rag ran the article today too, but has some details some of you might wish to look further into. Here is this section, verbatim: "So many people are turning off social network sites that new internet applications such as The Suicide Machine and Seppukoo have sprung up to help them. They automatically delete private content, friends and pictures and make accounts inaccessible with password changes."It might just be worth it, especially if you want to be sure that undesired content is removed.Cheers, DH66

Just a little follow-up to my last post. I've just checked out the two options provided by the article. It looks like facebook managed to cause the closure of those two sites several years ago! So much for up-to-dateness... However, all is not lost. If you google: "virtual suicide", there do appear to be a couple of currently operational sites. Under keywords "web 2.0 suicide machine alternative" it gets even more interesting. One example: http://www.moreof...machine/By the looks of it, there might even be an open source version of web2.0 suicide machine floating around. Maybe one of you might be interested in tracking it down.Best Regards, DH66

the only reason I use fb at all is to keep in touch with family spread all over the US and world... the grandkids and younger nieces/nephews use it a lot, and we interact with it. I intentionally don't allow personal pic's... for privacy. in fact, other than sharing science stuff, funny meme's and talking to far flung family, and the occasional news tidbit, I don't use it. although I have used it more lately, it only because I cant sleep most nights.

the trend to use real information in social networking always seemed like a fad. To use one and have the information used against you in a job interview is disgusting. In this world of snooping, it is easier to generate a bullshit email address, open an account with some BS name and then never use that email again... at least, never give it out on a resume.

anual FB suicide would not be a bad idea either. good way to purge lame friends. make it routine like changing your password.

Don't actually quit (or not create a profile). IMHO it's better to create a profile in your own name, put in the absolute bare minimum data, and then never use the profile again; just so nobody else can use your name. (And send to the spam bin the annoying automatic emails encouraging you to visit.)

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.

Javascript is currently disabled in your web browser. For full site functionality, it is necessary to enable Javascript.
In order to enable it, please see these instructions.